Serverless computing, also known as function as a service (FaaS), is a cloud computing code execution model in which the cloud provider fully manages starting and stopping of a function’s container platform as a service (PaaS) as necessary to serve requests, and requests are billed by an abstract measure of the resources required to satisfy the request, rather than per virtual machine, per hour. Despite the name, it does not actually involve running code without servers. The name “serverless computing” is used because the business or person that owns the system does not have to purchase, rent or provision servers or virtual machines for the back-end code to run on.

Serverless code can be used in conjunction with code written in traditional server style, such as microservices. For example, part of a web application could be written as microservices and another part could be written as serverless code. Alternatively, an application could be written that uses no provisioned servers at all, being completely serverless. Serverless code can either be triggered by specific events or be configured to run behind an API management platform in order to expose it as a REST API endpoint. With the onset of Node.JS, there has been a lot of heat in the JS-Realm, different teams, companies, individuals are constantly leveraging this technology and adding value to it, and this is happening right now, as you are reading this. The node.js eco-system is growing by 1000 modules per month and it is the winner by far if you go to the official website of the node.js modules (https://www.npmjs.com/), it reads

That is the number of the npm modules in the registry present currently, as I write this paper.

One of those packages is called as ServerLess, exactly what this discussion is about.

What is ServerLess?

Just by merely reading it out, in its literal terms it can be said it is to do something without using Servers or doing something minus the servers. So let’s first understand what are servers and why we need them: Simply put, servers are like any other Personal Computer but with more amount of RAM and more Hard disk space or you can also look at them as a piece of hardware which provide us with:

1. An operating system2. A
2. A file-handling mechanism
3. A system with more amount of computing power by using a high-end processor
4. A system with more hard disk space
5. A platform to install more software on it
6. A platform to host a web application on – This is exactly what we need when we want to make an application to be used by the entire world

Introduction to ServerLess

Ok, so having said that it is clear that they are essentially needed when hosting an application. In a typical application at a high-level there are two ends:

1. The front-end (the UI that shows up on the browser)
2. The back-end (the server-side logic to manipulate the data coming from the front-end and to send to a persistent store.)

So now, if we talk about ServerLess, it implies that you have a front-end but you do not have a back-end or a dedicated server to host it on, then how would you host or what would you host your application on AWS cloud.

In the Node.js realm, it is possible to develop an application that would not need a dedicated server and this has been made possible by the arrival of ServerLess, none the less the prerequisite is you would need a Cloud Service which is capable of understanding / supporting this technology.

For this discussion, we would be using AWS Cloud Service, not only because it was one of the first Cloud platforms the creators of ServerLess wanted to support but because AWS also has a feature called as Lambda functions where the functions can respond to a particular event. ServerLess demands a change in developer thought process and focuses on one of the strongest and oldest principle called as Single Responsibility Principle-SRP.

ServerLess asks the developer to divide all the functionalities/features of the application into small self-contained functions. Each of these functions would do one thing and one thing only. The server-side functionalities would be divided into several self-contained functions and each function acting as one ServerLess module.

How does it all work?

Let’s just walk through a project on a very high-level.

Before we start a serverless-project/module we need to create a serverless project template, to do this we simply execute a serverless create project binary inside the project directory (more details on this in the next article) and this creates a blank skeleton with some JavaScript, JSON files and a serverless.yaml file. This YAML file works its magic during deployment.

Once the developer is done with development and testing of the said function, he would use the deploy binary from ServerLess package to deploy to AWS Cloud, now this is exactly where the serverless magic happens, the ServerLess binaries executes the serverless.yaml file and starts making a logical stack of resources needed (by the function being deployed), this stack is what we call a AWS-CloudFormation. If there are no errors in this step, then stack is made and kept ready inside AWS CloudFormation.

During deployment the code-files are zipped up and stored in a bucket in S3, and the API Gateways, Lambda functions, AWS CloudWatch LogGroups etc. are created. All these resources even though they are created in the cloud, the owner of the cloud account is billed only when the resources are actually used per call, and every call to the deployed serverless module uses a fraction of the said resources, thereby bringing down the cost in a big way.

The first deploy usually takes 3-4 minutes depending upon resources mentioned, once done the URLs to trigger the functions are mentioned and exposed at the end of deployment. The URL can then be consumed in an Ajax call from the front-end and that’s it, any call made to the URLs triggers the Cloud stack into action, and the function is executed per call, thereby achieving a handshake between the front-end and a server-side functionality deployed in the cloud.

Also, a quick thing to be noted here is that all the heavy-lifting of:

1. Storing the code-files in S3
2. Creating API Gateways
3. Creating AWS CloudFormation Stack
4. Creating LogGroups in AWS CloudWatch
5. Creates a AWS-Lambda function where the created URL is mapped to a function whose code is stored in AWS-S3
6. Making provisions to use any other AWS resource

Is all done by the deploy binary in the serverless package, this step can even be mentioned in a CI/CD script and thereby taking it to another level of automated serverless module deployment.

Coming soon….

In the next article, we’ll see how to create a small application using AngularJs, a database service running at some host, a front-end stored and hosted from a static file repository everyone coming together to make one application but without any dedicated server in the picture.

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EC2 – Amazon Virtual Servers – EC2 instances are similar to the virtual private servers

S3 – Unlimited FTP Server – Store images and other assets for websites. Keep backups and share files between services. Host static websites. Also, many of the other AWS services write and read from S3.

VPC – Virtual Co-located Lab – Bunch of machines linked together as one VLAN.

Lambda – App Script Container – Run little self contained snippets of JS, Java or Python to do discrete tasks. Sort of a combination of a queue and execution in one. Used for storing and then executing changes to your AWS setup or responding to events in S3 or DynamoDB.

API Gateway – API Proxy – Proxy your apps API through this so you can throttle bad client traffic, test new versions, and present methods more cleanly.

RDS – Amazon SQL – Be your app’s Mysql, Postgres, and Oracle database.

IAM – Users, Keys and Certs – Set up additional users, set up new AWS Keys and policies

Route53 – Amazon DNS + Domains – Buy a new domain and set up the DNS records for that domain.

Cloudfront – Amazon CDN – Make your websites load faster by spreading out static file delivery to be closer to where your users are.

CloudSearch – Amazon Full text Search – Pull in data on S3 or in RDS and then search it for every instance

DynamoDB – Amazon NoSQL – Be your app’s massively scalable key value store

Elasticache – Amazon Memcached – Be your app’s Memcached or Redis.

Elastic Transcoder – Amazon Cut Pro – Video manipulation (change formats, compress, etc.)

SQS – Amazon Queue – Store data for future processing in a queue. The language for this is storing “messages” but it doesn’t have anything to do with email or SMS. SQS doesn’t have any logic, it’s just a place to put things and take things out.

WAF – AWS Firewall – Block bad requests to Cloudfront protected sites.

Cognito – Amazon OAuth – Give end users – (non AWS) – the ability to log in with Google, Facebook, etc.

SNS – Amazon Messenger – Send mobile notifications, emails and/or SMS messages

CodeCommit – Amazon GitHub – Version control your code – cloud Git.

Code Deploy – Get your code from your CodeCommit repo (or Github) onto a bunch of EC2 instances

CodePipeline – Amazon Continuous Integration – Run automated tests on your code and then do stuff with it depending on if it passes those tests.

EC2 Container Service – Amazon Docker as a Service – Put a Docker file into an EC2 instance so you can run a website

Elastic Beanstalk – Amazon Platform as a Service – Move your app hosted on other clouds to AWS

Data Pipeline – Amazon ETL – Extract, Transform and Load data from elsewhere in AWS. Schedule when it happens and get alerts when they fail.

Elastic Map Reduce (EMR) – Amazon Hadoop – Iterate over massive text files of raw data that you’re keeping in S3

Glacier – Large Amazon S3 – Make backups of your backups that you keep on S3.

Kinesis – Amazon Kafka – Ingest lots of data very quickly that you then later use other AWS services to analyze.

RedShift – Amazon Data Warehouse – Store a whole bunch of analytics data, do some processing, and dump it out.

CloudFormation – Amazon Services Setup – Set up a bunch of connected AWS services in one go

CloudTrail – Amazon Logging – Log who is doing what in your AWS stack (API calls).

CloudWatch – Amazon Status Pager – Get alerts about AWS services messing up or disconnecting

Config – Amazon Configuration Management – Keep from going insane if you have a large AWS setup and changes are happening that you want to track.

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Amazon Web Services is an Amazon company that offers on-demand cloud storage tools and APIs on a metered pay-as-you-go basis for individuals, companies, and governments. IrisLogic provide end-to-end services for businesses that use Amazon Web Services to create essential cloud solutions. Our deep expertise and automated designs and processes mean that we provide you with the fastest time to value AWS, whether you first migrate to AWS, provide 24 x 7 operational management of your AWS environments or leverage your business value AWS solutions through automation and cloud solutions. We will manage your cloud infrastructure with AWS while you’re focused on increasing your business. Get complete peace of mind with our controlled cloud hosting services for AWS.

Our AWS area of expertise include following key areas:

S3 And EC2

Amazon Cloud Search lets you manage a mobile application or website search solution. Amazon S3 stores a vast volume of data and the AWS EC2 lets developers easily install and manage cloud-based applications.

Serverless API And CloudWatch

We integrate Serverless API with ‘API Gateway’ Amazon Web Services allows clients to focus on their core activities. Cloud watch enables real-time surveillance of AWS resources

Lambda And CloudTail

AWS Lambda lets you execute code in response to unique events and AWS CloudTrail lets you record API calls and send log files for storage to Amazon S3 buckets.

Amazon Glacier, S3 And Route-53

We handle the data as an archival in a cost-effective way for the long term. IrisLogic have experience handling your DNS information in a simple way, hosting areas, DNS queries.

Amazon VPC And Elasticache

Cost-effectively, we handle your private cloud with ease. We, at IrisLogic, manage device caching via Redis and Memcached to deliver high performance.

Amazon RDS And Cloudfront

We specialize in setting and scaling up your database to make it simple and high performing. Our experts have the experience to speed up your static and dynamic web content delivery to your users in less time.

AWS Cloud Implementation

IrisLogic provides Amazon Web Services and follows the cloud computing approach in three steps.

1. We develop a strategy for optimizing cloud performance and rethink ways to change your cloud business operations.
2. We transform applications by rationalizing and migrating workloads, or by creating new cloud applications, as per the predefined strategy.
3. Our cloud specialists optimize the allocation of the workload to public and private utilities for secured operations as per the business requirement.

Migration And Strategy Of AWS

Use our proven cloud migration services to migrate your simple to complex applications. Our realistic approach of AWS helps the customer turn their business into an agile business. We research in-depth about your current program and can help you move it to services AWS Cloud. After the process is complete, we get keys for an automated cloud environment that’s fit for your app. These are the steps covered under this process are.

• Infrastructure migration: The proven method that our experts employ helps deploy your IT infrastructure into a successful relocation. This ensures a smooth transition with fewer downtimes.
• Data migration: Assess the current infrastructure in your company & gather critical data. Carrying out a smooth analysis will help deliver a smooth process of cloud migration ahead.
• Application migration: We offer successful application migration which bridges the technology gaps. IrisLogic’s powerful cloud computing services seamlessly push your device or product.
• Cloud-native capabilities: We define how we deploy your applications live in the cloud with cloud-native services. IrisLogic effectively employs agile methods, DevOps, and other cloud platforms.

AWS For Mobile And Web

We use AWS services to build potent integrated mobile and web backends so that you can build and scale, using cloud power. We help app owners get the best performance out of their cloud environment, from enhancing content delivery to reducing dependencies. Work with data in real-time or analyze cloud big data with ease.

IrisLogic AWS Services

• Secure : We offer the most comprehensive security capabilities to satisfy the most demanding requirements.
• Compliant : We know that customers care deeply about data security and privacy. Our services offer all the functionalities, enablers, and legal agreements that are part of AWS customer compliance.
• Hybrid : The professional experts at IrisLogic can assist you in building hybrid architectures that extend your on-site infrastructure to the cloud though amazon web services.
• Scalable : At IrisLogic, we have vowed to make things easier for our clients. With just a few minutes’ notice, access as much or as little as you need, and scale up and down as needed.

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